The Tiger's Wife

table when he turned the radio on; and then, just like that, he recognized the Monk’s nasal twang, an octave higher than it should have been, cutting through the melody of one of Luka’s own songs like some kind of terrible joke. His body seemed to fall away from him.

It was “The Enchantress,” a song he had written with and about Amana, reduced from its slow tempo, intended for the gusla, to a frenzied ode about debauchery. He half expected to wake up moments later and find that he had passed out drunk the night before—but he didn’t, he just sat and sat there on the kitchen chair while the song moved through the verses, and then it was over, and the radio had moved on to something else. His songs had moved on without him, too, moved on to the School of Music.

He looked up to see the girl standing over him, his wet shirt slung across her shoulder like skin.

“Listen,” he said to her, and touched his ear and then the radio. He ran his fingers over the top of the mahogany box. She stood there, smiling at him. In that moment, he was still himself. Then she made a gesture, something like a half shrug, and she leaned forward, took one of the plum slices from under his knife, put it under her tongue, and turned away to go outside. He was up before he knew what he was doing, pushing the table onto her, pinning her facedown under the full weight of it. The sound her body made when she struck the floor stayed in him, and he stood over her and kicked her ribs and head until blood came out of her ears.

Everything about that first time surprised him. His own inexplicable rage, the dull thud of his boot against her body, her soundless, gaping mouth and closed eyes. He realized that he had gone on hitting her far longer than he had intended, because he had been expecting her to cry out in fear or pain. He realized afterward, while he was helping her up, that his curiosity about whether she could even produce sound had just been fulfilled, and, now that it had, there was even more rage than ever: rage at himself, rage at her for looking so surprised and forlorn and subdued when he brought the water in to wash the blood off her face.

He told himself that it would never happen again. But, of course, it did. Something had opened in him, and he could not close it again. It happened the night of his father’s funeral, when it was just Luka and the girl and the house, silence everywhere. He thought, after me, there will be no children, no one left, and rolled on top of her. He would try, he told himself, to fuck her—he would try. But it had been months since he had managed it, and, feeling her under him, small and tense, as still as death, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even hurt her that way. Hitting her didn’t help, either—but it made him feel like he was doing something, interrupting her judgment at the very least. The injustice of it, that judgment he knew was there but couldn’t force out. He couldn’t force her to voice it, and he couldn’t force her to put it away.

Eventually, it was just the fear in her eyes when he walked in, just the way her shoulders shrank back when she was scrubbing the floor and felt his footsteps through the floorboards. The fact that she could see him that way, a side of himself that surprised him. Sometimes he would throw things at her: fruit, plates, a pot of boiling water that hit her at the waist and soaked through her clothes while she panted and her eyes rolled in terror. Once he held her against the wall with his body and slammed his forehead into her face until her blood seeped into his eyes.

People in Galina now, they give a thousand explanations for Luka’s marriage to the tiger’s wife. She was the bastard child of a notorious gambler, some say, who was forced on Luka as payment for a tremendous debt, a shameful secret that followed him back from those years he spent in Turkey. According to others, he purchased her from a thief in Istanbul, a man who sold girls at the souk, where she had stood quietly among the spice sacks and pyramids of fruit until Luka found her.

Whatever Luka’s reason, there is general agreement that the girl’s presence in his life was intended to hide something, because a deaf-mute could not reveal the truth about the assorted vices he was presumed to have during his ten-year absence: his gambling, his whoring, his predilection for men. And perhaps, in some part, that is true; perhaps he had allowed himself to think he had found someone to put between himself and the village, someone whose appearance, if not her disability, would discourage people from making contact while he secluded himself and planned a return to his dream that would never be fulfilled—she would remind them too much of the last war, their fathers’ fears, stories they’d heard of sons lost to the sultan. Never mind, the villagers thought, that he had found a wife who could never demand anything of him, never reproach him for being drunk, never beg for money.

But, in keeping her, Luka had also stumbled into an unwelcome complication. He had underestimated the power of her strangeness, the village’s potential for a fascination with her, and now people were talking more than ever. The secrecy she had been intended to afford him had turned his life into a public spectacle. He could hear them chattering now, gossiping, speculating and flat-out lying about where she’d come from and how he had found her, asking each other about the bruises on her arms, about why Luka and his wife were rarely seen in public together, why she’d yet to bear him a child—every possible answer leading only to further questions, further humiliations. It was worse than the first winter of their marriage, when he had brought her with him to church on Christmas, and the entire congregation had whispered afterward, What does he mean by bringing her here? Worse even than the following Christmas, when he had not, and they said, What does he mean by leaving her at home?

And now they were talking about the smokehouse. In the two days since the tiger was spotted in the village, there were whispers everywhere. What had she been doing, they were asking in doorways, in the smokehouse with that tiger? And what did it mean, they wanted to know, that Luka couldn’t keep her in his bed?

For weeks, he had suspected that the smokehouse was missing meat, but he had second-guessed his own judgment, refusing to believe that she had the audacity to steal from him. And then he had seen the tiger, and the sight of that pork in the big cat’s jaws had stunned him—that little gypsy, he had thought, that Mohammedan bitch, sneaking out and giving his meat to the devil. She was making him look like an idiot.

The night he returned from the hunt, he took her outside and tied her up in the smokehouse. He told himself that he wanted only to punish her, but, while he was eating his supper and getting ready for bed, he understood that some part of him was hoping that the tiger would come for her, that it would come in the night and rip her apart, and in the morning Luka would awake to find nothing.

If you go to Galina now, people will tell you different things about Luka’s disappearance. In one version of the story, the village woodcutter, waking from a dream in which his wife has forgotten to put the pie in the oven and served it to him raw, looks through the window and sees Luka wandering down the road in his nightgown, a white scarf tying his chin to the rest of his head so that the mouth will not fall open in death, his red butcher’s apron slung over one shoulder. In that version, Luka’s face is as loose as a puppet’s, and there is a bright light in his eyes, the light of a journey beginning. The woodcutter stands with the window curtains flung open, his legs stiff with fear and lack of sleep, and he watches the butcher’s slow advance through the snowdrifts that are running across the dead man’s bare feet.

Others will tell you about the baker’s eldest daughter, who, getting up early to warm the ovens, opens the window to let the winter air in to cool her and sees a grounded hawk sitting like something ancient on the fallen snow of her garden. The hawk’s shoulders are dark with blood, and when it hears her open the window it turns and looks at her with yellow eyes. She asks the hawk, “Is all well with you, brother—or not?” and the hawk replies, “Not,” and vanishes.

Whatever the details, the consensus is that there was an immediate awareness of Luka’s death, and an immediate acknowledgment that the tiger’s wife was responsible—but many of the people telling you the story couldn’t have been alive when it happened, and then it becomes clear that they have all been telling each other